Opening: Saturday, February 14, 2026, h 18:00
Livorno. SAC – Spazio Arte Contemporanea is pleased to present Quaderni di Pittura_1, an exhibition bringing together the works of Francesca Filicaia, Gemma Mazzotti, Nikko Mundacruz, and Marila Scartozzi, the four artists awarded the Gallery Prize as part of the 2025 Combat Prize.
The exhibition project builds on and further develops the dialogue initiated with the artists during the previous edition of the Combat Prize, opening a new phase of exchange and research between their individual practices and the exhibition space.
Quaderni di Pittura_1 is the first chapter of a project conceived as an open series: not an exhibition understood as a final outcome, but a device intended to unfold over time as a space for observing, testing, and listening to contemporary painting. The reference to the idea of a “notebook” points to a processual dimension, made of notes, returns, and sedimentations, in which the image never becomes definitively fixed but remains open to the possibility of change.
In a present dominated by speed and the overproduction of images, painting today seems called upon to question its own self-evidence. Rather than producing recognizable figures, it becomes a space in which to slow down the gaze, make the duration of making perceptible, and challenge the transparency of the image and its immediate legibility. In this sense, the exhibition takes shape as a field of tension between memory and presence: memory understood as a silent reservoir of inner images and sedimented experiences; presence understood as the act of painting itself, made of gesture, layering, and the resistance of matter.
Between these two poles operates the imagination, not as an escape from reality but as a device of transformation. Images are not simply remembered or observed: they are reconstructed, deformed, and recombined. Pictorial matter holds the time of the work within it and preserves its traces, resisting any definitive closure of the image.
Within this shared horizon, the four artists’ practices unfold through distinct yet interrelated languages. Francesca Filicaia works with intimate and silent subjects—faces, objects, isolated figures—that slowly emerge from the background, keeping the image in a state of suspension. In Gemma Mazzotti, landscape becomes a perceptual field, built through a shifting balance between drawing and color, transparency and opacity. In Nikko Mundacruz, the image turns into an emotional and atmospheric space, conveying fragile presences marked by a constant tension between closeness and distance. Finally, in Marila Scartozzi, painting is crossed by a conflicted relationship with reality: figures surface from unstable layers, suspended between emergence and dissolution.
In Quaderni di Pittura_1, painting does not present itself as a surface to be quickly deciphered, but as a space of duration and relation. The exhibition itself appears as an open notebook: a place where the image never fully coincides with itself, but remains unstable, available, and awaiting the gaze.
In dialogue with the exhibition, SAC presents two portrait-focused workshop sessions led by the exhibiting artists (20 February 2026, 9:30 a.m.; 27 February 2026, 10:00 a.m.). An extension of the project in the form of practice: the image as process, the portrait as a space of relation, the gesture as duration and threshold.
Quaderni di Pittura_1
14 February – 28 February 2026
SAC – Spazio Arte Contemporanea
Via L. Boccherini 22, 57124 Livorno (LI)
Info: info@premiocombat.it
Tel: +39 331 130 3702